Rustic Gardens Wedding and Event Center Open House

We had a wonderful time out at Rustic Gardens last night and got the chance to meet some fantastic people! Thanks to everyone who came out to support all of your local vendors. There were bakers, makeup artists, photographers, fitness professionals, lighting and sound specialists, barbecue caterers, and even fresh squeezed lemonade! It was truly a great night and we are so happy to have been a part of it.

Image Photography by Julie Pinsinski was set up next to me and was able to capture some real pictures of our booths, but here is my blurry camera phone picture of mine - I was so proud of it! My first show :)

My sign kept falling off! Note to self: figure out a better way of hanging that sign!

I got to design our brochure myself! I thought it was pretty!

We knew we were going to meet several bride-to-be's and their families, so we wanted to make sure our product offering had a lot of variety. So, we were busy planning and designing in the weeks leading up to the show!

Let me introduce you to the newest additions to our stationery family!

the gardenia.

Secret Garden Themed - hence, the key!

Gate Fold Design - to represent the Secret Garden's Gate

Green and White, like the Gardenia color scheme!

the bare tree.

Petal Fold Card in Onyx Black

Stunning black and white contrasting color scheme.

the wisteria.

Soft color scheme and an interchangeable embossed stamp design!

the bicycle.

Tandem bicycle Invitation

Save the Date

the coffee bean.

the ?

I'm not sure what to name this little guy yet! But it's cute!

If you have a name suggestion, let us know!

Rustic Gardens Open House

02-24-12

 Be there to see some of the local vendors and this beautiful new wedding venue!

We'll be there showcasing some of our work along with Image Photography by Julie Pinsinski and a few other local wedding professionals. 

and.

We'll be offering all brides who attend a 25% discount on our paper goods and custom design process! 

Sign up at our table and when your purchase comes through, we'll hook you up! ;) 

No need to go all the way to San Antonio or beyond to find the perfect wedding vendor when you have a number of choices right here in your local area! 

So, come out and see us and help support another local business!

3:00-7:00 p.m.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Rustic Gardens Weddings & Events

14025 Highway 87, Adkins, TX

2013 Wedding Color Trends

... and an update from our household!

2013 is in its early stages and already bold color combinations are coming out on top! Late in 2012, the wedding industry foresaw an upswing in soft mint green and rose pink, which is a beautiful, sweet color combination!

Then, in January we saw a definite lean towards a bold emerald color scheme - such a rich color for a wedding! Perfect for spring and summer, hinting at the lush greenery that touches our world in the warmer months.

Now, we are seeing a comeback in the sparkling, glittery gold! That's very exciting to us, as our first invitation suite featured a bold, gold pocket folder.

Here was our first suite - featuring a gold pocket fold with navy blue accents to include a real, pressed blue bonnet (love those Texas wildflowers!)

We'd love to see those color combinations mixed together - mint and gold would be stunning, and emerald and gold would be a show stopper for sure. Maybe a future design?

Oh and from our household - our beloved foster dog Nnicholas had to go back to the DoD early Monday morning after an unfortunate accident with a horse. He snapped his leash and chased the horse, taking a clip to the nose. After they took him into x-ray, they found he had been shot! A week or two before this incident, I had treated a little hole on him, where I thought one of his little play buddies got a little too rough with him - it was so small I didn't think much of it! Unfortunately, it was a shot from an air propelled pellet gun that one of our neighbors shot him with... one shot, through the chest - meant to kill him, in my opinion. Poor Nnicholas was probably only trying to protect our little house - he deserves a puppy program purple heart for being injured in the line of duty, protecting our household before he even reported for military working dog duty! It was a sad week and we are heartbroken to have had to give him up early (at all! he was so sweet). Anyway, we hope all of you dog/pet owners keep a good eye out for your pets. You never know who your neighbors are.

You'll be missed silly Nnicholas!

Custom Work 03/16/2013

I just finished up two separate batches of custom invitation work for two very lovely brides who are looking forward to their big days in March - one is even on my birthday, the 23rd! :)

Now that the invitations have been sent out for Cecilia's wedding, she went ahead and gave me a green light on creating a blog post showcasing her GORGEOUS one of a kind invitations.

We teamed up in the early stages of planning to start brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of each other. What we came up with is just simply amazing. With a palette of eggplant, lavender, and silver, the design incorporates a little bit of the old French flair of Louisiana with an old photo album theme.

A custom ordered stamp featured their names and wedding date - they got to take it home with them!

Every piece was carefully hand bound.

The old photo album style featured two of their engagement shots accented by silver photo corners.

The main invitation featured a small fleur de lis and was backed by beautiful metallic lavender card stock. Elegant!

The hand bound booklet featured the main invitation, a center frame holding a musical piece composed for Cecilia by her fiance, Steven, and three inserts. The RSVP was spelled out in French to capture a little bit of the old French heritage in Louisiana.

The piece composed for Cecilia by her future husband,  Steven! There is a subtle fleur de lis showing through the vellum.

She let me put a little stamp on the back for advertising purposes! Awesome! 

We are hoping to showcase our second custom order here in the weeks to come! Meanwhile, we hope to be designing a few more signature series invitations and save the dates to add to our collection.

An Adventure in Crafting a Website

SEO. Now there's an acronym that sends a lot of people reeling - including me! It stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is one term I've come to be friends with over the past few months while crafting our website. We were so excited yesterday to have FINALLY released our website to the public!  

< PLUG > WWW.WILDLACEINVITATIONS.COM </ PLUG >

Haha ok. Seriously, though, building up a nice looking website is a lot of work! Even though we've been working on building it for months now, it still has a long way to go. Content needs to be added, pictures need to be uploaded, and most importantly, our Search Engine Optimization needs to be continuously built upon - it's all very extensive to me, a non computer-savvy person.

Our journey began with me browsing through a lot of other people's stationery sites. They were gorgeous. I decided I wanted a website, so that our company could look more professional and more reputable online. I talked to Steven about it, and we decided to opt for a website that not only featured our work, but also gave us the capabilities to actually capture the sales online. 

We knew we had a plan ready for action. We teamed up with Volusion, an online hosting/e-commerce solution. They offer pre-designed templates, hosting, domain name services, and a lot of fantastic features that would help us to keep track of our website's performance and our business intelligence all in one convenient location. We found our perfect template, bought our host name, plan, and domain name and then we were off to build! In the meantime, I set up a little Etsy shop that could start drawing some orders while our website was down. This, ladies and gentlemen, is where I was first introduced to SEO.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is making sure your site pops up to the search engines when someone goes to Google and searches for something related to your work. It's something that has to be built up through many different avenues so that your website shows up higher on the search list, without having to pay someone bookoo bucks to feature it at the top. 

Since I am also a member of Wedding Wire, I am able to take advantage of their online education center. I attended several webinars on the subject and learned several ways of increasing your visibility to those search engines! 

Here are a few tips I've tried to follow:

1. Monitor where you stand: http://www.seositecheckup.com  helps me to see where my weaknesses and strengths are.

2. Keep up with those keywords: Load up with keywords, but don't stuff them in there! Don't want to look like a spammer. For my business page, I loaded up on a lot of words about San Antonio Wedding Invitations, Custom Invitations, Handmade Invitations, the various materials I used, etc. 

3. Link back to yourself: There are links within your page that lead back to you and your website link is on other websites that have very reputable, well built up SEO. When you're super connected to sites like WeddingWire.com, theknot.com, etc., you have a better chance of looking reputable to a search engine.

4. Have a sitemap:  Lucky for me, Volusion has this built into their sites. I would have no idea how to set this up otherwise.

5. Have a search friendly URL: Don't be www.adfjkl_1243_kald_.com please... no one will know what the heck that is. Also, we were advised to keep it short - something people will not hate typing. We originally were going with wildflowersandlaceinvitations.com but look how long that is! We chose wildlaceinvitations.com instead. It also helps to have keywords IN your URL! Clever.

7. Image Descriptions: Search engines don't look at the pretty pictures, they eat text. So write something in the image description place and make sure it has some keywords! ;)

8. Content: Fresh. Fresh. Fresh. Update it regularly, keep it original, and keep it interesting to your clients!

9. Social Media Love: Share content from your website on social media platforms - the links help give you more SEO lovin'. 

10. Link to Others: Make online friends and link to them, they will return the favor and everyone is a happy camper. 

Well, there is my informative post of the week. I hope I didn't bore all of you readers out there. I'm also hoping if you are a small business owner interested in getting your piece of real estate on the world wide web, this helped you just a little bit! 

Happy creating!

2013 Beginnings

Well with the new year came a flurry of activity that had to be taken care of!! We had two gorgeous custom orders that required a lot of attention, so we were completely focused on that (hence our absence from the blog),

Country Chic

Vintage Photo Album

Carlie Exploring Lou's Mouth

 we added a new member to our little family (Carlie the German Shepherd), and have been working like crazy on getting our official website up and running! We got our photos back from Image Photography by Julie Pinsinski, so we are very excited to go through those and get them up on our website this week. Furthermore, we've started the year with a few other custom orders that look like they will be a ton of fun to work on. A Brave themed birthday suite, a version of our Delphinium suite to include save the dates, and another custom wedding coming up later this year with what is sure to be an exciting theme. :) Can't wait to see what 2013 has in store for us! Once these ladies get their custom work mailed out, I'll post a more detailed blog about each of the suites showing off some of their unique design elements. I've taken some pretty nice pictures myself, actually ;)  Have a wonderful week!

Holiday Craziness

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!

I am a huge fan of Christmas, but here in Texas it feels more like May lately... so that really puts a damper on my holiday spirit some days. I miss the snowy weather of Maryland! I remember the first Christmas I spent there, we had a freak Snowpocalypse and it snowed about four feet. It. Was. Awesome. 

Weather aside, the holidays are one of the most popular times for proposals and that gets me excited any time of the year! I love the idea of a Merry Christmas Proposal... my favorite one was documented in a YouTube video last year: 

He built Mainstreet USA for her!! Awesome!! We'd love to hear some of your proposal stories! I know mine was completely "us".

I had just returned from a trip to Germany and was sort of expecting it already. He surprised me at the airport with a huge bouquet of my favorite flowers. He had it broken into three clues that he gave me throughout the drive home: a wooden heart, a small horseshoe, and a mug with a bee painted on it. I was so tired and cranky about flying, time changes, losing a contact, having a headache, etc., that I could not figure these clues out for the life of me! I was even getting mad at the clues because I couldn't figure it out haha. I just wanted to SLEEP! 

So, he takes me to this pond where we had Valentine's Day just a year before and has me close my eyes and he puts a bunch of candles around me. Of course, they don't light because it's a little windy and OF COURSE rude people would set up their fishing camp five feet away. So, we had to pack up our candles and move up. Steven eventually had to give me the clues because I couldn't figure them out - the wooden heart was "would", the horseshoe was "you", the mug with the bee was "be" and when he pulled out the ring, he said, "my wife!" Haha and to top our whole proposal off, he pulled out the ring upside down since he was all nervous. It was totally us, since we always have plans go slightly awry when we make them! That's why our proposal is so special to us...it fit our personalities perfectly! 

Anyway, congratulations to all of you newly engaged or continuously married couples out there. Tell us your proposal stories, we'd love to hear them!!

From Wildflowers and Lace Invitations, we wish you all a very special, merry holiday season!